Closure in Drawing and Painting
When we hear this phrase, Dah Dah Dah Dah-Dah… we automatically want to complete it with Dah Dah. There is nothing in the phrase itself indicating that one needs to complete the phrase in just this way, nevertheless, Dah Dah Dah, Dah-Dah…seems to require a Dah Dah. This tendency toward completion is the force of closure, or in other words, a requirement.
Closure, sometimes called completion phenomenon, is the name given to the visual force in human perception that tends to complete an incomplete experience. The term, closure, is from psychology. In visual art, closure refers to the way in which viewers see similar elements in a visual field as connected to each other, for example, patterns, textures, marks, or lights “closing” with other lights, reds with reds, darks with darks, etc.
Completion is neither arbitrary nor merely the result of artistic intention but occurs in particular ways according to structural laws and principles of visual organization. In the painting/drawing process, we may experience this as a feeling of “inevitability” or “requirement.”
Closure is the unseen visual glue binding figure and ground, parts to wholes, a force of integration that underlies our experience of shapes and forms as well as of the objects and spaces we identify and name. It is the force joining parts to form larger wholes. In its simplest form the term closure refers to a set of perceived relationships.
Closure constitutes a tendency towards unity rather than disparity; it is a reorganization of unconnected visual information into cohesive, sometimes cognitive, appearances; a reorganization of stimulus into patterns. Viewers experience closure when their perceptual system reorganizes information into patterns, whole configurations, and units. Reorganization will always move towards a simple rather than a complex configuration. This does not mean that the complexity is reduced to geometric solids, but rather that the perceptual drive is to complete the incomplete in the simplest configuration.
The attached image consists of four black shapes. They appear as a circle. Why does this happen? The eye and brain tend to close the four marks into a pattern, a simple concentric pattern that feels like a circle. Closure creates perceived relationships. It underlies how viewers and artists see and make sense of shapes, colors, lines, and forms within a drawing or painting. Closure is a kind of visual glue, binding parts together into wholes and making one part appear to belong or fit with another.
Neurologists have identified cells in the brain that respond to horizontals and verticals, triangles, circles, and other shapes. The human visual system instinctively organizes visual information into patterns, configurations, and units, without the viewer’s volition. Furthermore, brains prefer a simple rather than a complex configuration. This innate drive to complete the incomplete is always in the direction of the simplest configurations.